This course is an introduction to the anthropology of South Asian religions. It focuses on definitions of self, from individuality to self-renunciation, in modern day Indian religion and society. Our primary texts are detailed and provocative ethnographies and histories of life in India that define the self in radically different ways. We will meet a person who has no individual essence, the "dividual" person, enmeshed in religion, ritual purity and pollution, and caste, who ultimately transforms into the religious virtuoso, free from social and spiritual bondage. We will also become acquainted with definitions of self in two of the "great traditions" of South Asia, the image-worshiping Jains in North India and Hindu Tamils in the South. And finally we will encounter people who resist the definitions of others, with subaltern, feminist, and nationalist critiques of the dominant descriptions self and South Asian people, religion, and culture. The course charts three contemporary `schools' of anthropology on religion in India. The first is an "idealist" approach, where social life is based on ideology and philosophy, and interpreted from the high-culture's religious texts. Dumont is emblematic of this approach. In his Homo Hierarchicus, he describes a person in traditional caste society as devoid of individuality, the ideological opposite of `western' concepts of the person. The second "phenomenologist" approach is represented by anthropologists that temper the ideological method by studying "religion on the ground," in practices that vary across South Asia in local negotiations of self, communal identity, and tradition. For a Hindu example we will read Daniels' Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. For Jainism we will read Cort's studies of Jain lay and mendicant identities and Laidlaw's Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy and Society among the Jains. The third approach is broadly "revisionist," critical of Orientalist, colonialist, and elitist constructions of the self. Our readings include Stephens' Feminist Fictions: A Critique of the Category `Non-Western Woman' in Feminist Writings on India, Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak? and Nandy's The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of the Self Under Colonialism. Lecture and Discussion. Requirements: full attendance and participation, and three 4- to 6-page essays. Enrollment limited to 20.

Hour: HEIM